I'm with you part of the way here, certainly as far as blaming the decline of American intellectual competitiveness on Fox Tv. Any country that gets its model for how to regard education from The Simpsons and its models for effort and achievement from American Idol and its notion of political right and wrong from The O'Reilly Factor is clearly rolling down the rails to ruin. . . .
Seriously, sarcasm muddies the discussion. You have just dumped some odious kneejerk conservative stereotypes and xenophobia on us like it was a solution to China eating our lunch. Do you have a solution? Bush is just a stalking horse for far more intelligent people like Cheney, Rummy and Wolfowitz who share your selfish streak. Bush is too cozy with regligious fanatatics who don't know or care if the US fields well educated kids so long as Leviticus is made the law of the land and the bedroom. Bush didn't get us in the mess we are in vis a vis Asia's looming technology juggernaut. But he represents a party line obsessed with problems mostly of its own making on which our precious resources and dwindling time are being wasted. If we were pursuing international policies of justice rather than fear, reprisal and, lets face it, nailing down the oil supply, we could mount a better campaign to educate more Americans and make more of them productive [TFA emphasizes the output of universities but the country that has atrophied factories is going broke sooner or later]
Why not blame Bush?
Who do you blame, [other than Fox TV]?
I am near to despair myself though obviously for different reasons. Liberals, the conservatives profusely write, are just whiners and blamers. They should talk to me, instead of just talking about me. I blame Bush but I also keep my skills up to date and manage to stay in work even as software jobs go abroad: thats MY solution. We can't keep China down, they aren't stupid people and they are used to their country's crappy ideas of personal and politcal freedoms. My bet is that their wages rise slightly and that new buying power then pushes up OUR prices, especicially for raw materials (some of which we still export). Then US wages effectively drift down to Asian levels and Asian wages stagnate as their govt's allocate more and more for the scarcer resources. Market force or government planned economy won't make as much difference as the Bush league would hope when the goal of not starving your factories becomes terribly near-term. My guess is the end-game has some gritty east-west parity where NAFTA-like agreements are seen as more important than nuclear weapons in shaping our future. That or we are all dead. I believe that what national survival is about is much the same as what species survival is about: getting the most bang out of the resources. That takes education, a point we seem to agree about. It does NOT take an administration that operates by banging on the countries that have the resources and spends our last nickel and borrows like crazy to play last super-power standing. We can't afford it...look east and see who can afford it.
Where did I say or imply that I mistook this commenter to be the Theo? The first thing I did was click on his nickname. His [her?] profile claims a netbsd domain! If I am to address a reply to this persons comment and they have given themselves the name Theo, what should I do, Address them as "dear person masquerading as Mr de Raadt"?
Really now, why do you say I am suckered? Its not like I should only reply to comments by certified big name posters.
I'm not so sure Theo. Not that I know exactly what the standards of proof are in these cases but AMOUNT and VARIETY of evidence is extensive. On March 8, the Japanese Trade Commission charged Intel with anticompetative practices that included threats and thinly veiled kick-backs to induce sales...these are documented. Maybe that sort of thing has been "business as usual" up until now but I wouldn't stand for it if I ran AMD.
the mods have been promoting mostly answers that start with "if I were living X hundred years ago" and "the geeks of yore did W and Z". [and they are mostly interesting answers, I admit]. But the question is what DO you do?
In fact, if you are an orthodox greenie or you are convinced that petroleum resources will dry up in the next decade, you SHOULD be DOING some low-tech nerdwork right now.
Some things I do:
design passive solar heated housing: no electronics but some mechanical or hydraulic feed back to regulate temp from solar sources and earth/water heat sinks.
composting: i have been experimenting with staging anerobic and aerobic phases to speed up the breakdown [it still takes me 3 years to turn unsorted yard and kitchen wastes into a good garden product.]
design pedal powered mowing, earthmoving and transportation stuff...the bicycle, evolved as it is, is just a starting point.
study how to produce solar concentrators of high precision without recourse to computers, CNC machines etc. We all know how to make an elipse with 2 pins and a loop of string but I know how to make a parablola with pulleys, string and an xacto knife.
trying to figure out a sustainable tree and crop rotation pattern on marginal acreage that would support a family without motorized tilling and harvesting, using wood stoves for heat, in perpetuity on the minimum amount of land.
self regulating greenhouses to extend growing season in colder climates and without pesticides or pumped water.
low tech biological pest control. E.G. gypsy moths all but destroyed my oak trees 20 years ago but I found a few of the caterpillers were dying of some disease. I collected all the limp, sick ones I could find, waited until the fungus or bacteria that attacks them had turned them into little bags of pus, put them in a blender [the wife LOVED that!], filtered the product and sprayed it all over my property. To this day, even when the moths have denuded the trees in other parts of town, my trees fare well and the caterpillers are dying left and right. I need to study more so I can preserve the germs for use elsewhere.
Being a geek would be so satisfying if i didn't have to make enough money to pay all that tuition!
...In the meantime, I don't suggest cutting back on vaccinations over fear of autism,...
That is the public reason given by CDC for bending over backwards to keep any vaccine on the market: they know, to 3 sigma, what happens if you DONT get vaccinated and, having satisfied themselves of the cost/benefit tradeoff of the vaccination, set about downplaying those sideeffects so the public wont avoid the vaccine. Only problem is, its an incredibly high stakes game for Big Pharma and the poor and poorly publicised protections against conflict of interest between FDA, CDC and Big Pharma [such as have just come to light in this article] makes it possible for the financial interest of the drug company to get better protection than the public's health. In other words, the CDC wants to do good and Big Pharma want to do well and the way our system is working, it is possible to blur the two objectives to the favor of the drug companies.
You might have been just guessing or you might know something...I had to mod you insightful after I checked the weekly chart for
SUNW...it happened just like you said.
latest bumble would be redundant so let me try to keep my blood pressure down and look for alternative interpretations of the decision:
If we kill enough of the basic data gathering about solar cycles, there will be less data to refute the head-up-their-ass contingent who say global warming is not caused by fuelish humans and is just natural variation in the output of the sun... Nah, that didn't help me any either...what our govmint is doing to science just sucks any way I look at it.
I am still going to get 3 emails a day asking me
to correct the credit card numbers and other data
for an e-Bay account I don't have and never have had. [and partly because of the e-mails, never will have]
Its interesting that you and QuantumG both get moded insightful...I guess insights can be different without being wrong.
It gets hard to keep track of what the real issues raised by the article are, there are several. But the argument over whether the potential for abuse inherent in sloppily set up WiFi is more like the victim advertising his vulnerabilities or not...well, lets keep in mind that the most likely victims are unaware of the vulnerability./. readers are probably a bit more clued than the average person using a laptop at south station. And mind you, with Fidelity Investments, the Federal Reserve and a half dozen major banks all served by South Station, some VERY INTERESTING emails and transactions may be exposed. WiFi is not so old nor, in terms of user experience, so dissimilar from wired internet access that the average user should be expected to just know that he is far more naked in his communications. Although the article should certainly be a caution that the FREEDOM to communicate/compute anywhere can only be safely enjoyed if the individual user takes RESPONSIBILITY for his own security layer, real users just aren't there yet. The big picture of the article is that through slovenly and unprofessional practices, users have been rendered more exposed and vulnerable than they should reasonably expect to be.
In another life, I had a hell of time moding these comments. I RTFA...which was seriously light on details though definitely/.-worthy...and searched nearly in vain for any critical comments or input from the medically informed. About all I found were two posters who underscored the importance of the development because they know what skin grafting is like and a few who knew of some state-side precedents for using ink jets to apply tissue or cell components. But most commenting is either spam, porn, transporter or fax jokes. Why didn't somebody say:
"...100 years.." Gimme a break! We don't know what is going to happen in the next 10 years...Why not just write: "this is an incremental break through in reconstructive surgery but it won't be interesting to/. readers unless we set a timeframe that invites sloppy science fiction discussion "
"Could it lead to a fax machine for complete living organisms?"Goofy speculation insanely beyond the already dubious speculation in the art. [researcher quoted in TFA:"...we aren't there yet" was speaking of scaffolds for organs, i.e. connective tissue only not whole organs] did poster RTFA?
I only saw a few
informed comments well down from the top about what medical techniques are needed to compliment and make the potential of the tissue printer viable
Since when is the 5th or 10th repeat of "I'll fax my fanny to the whitehouse" worthy of anything but REDUNDANT?
if you just HAVE to talk about transporters as if they were the very next step beyond a system that harvests a certain cell type, ferments up a batch of those cells suspended in a fluid that keeps em alive as they are shot out a nozzle...then why not address the minor difficulty of sampling every kind of tissue you have [ brain cells with many specializations and perhaps as much of their critical functionality in the physiology of their synaptic connections as in their cellular chemistry may not even be the hardest to get right] and getting ALL of them to mass produce themselves in the same large ratio? Wouldn't it be more likely and less painful to suppose that in the future, MRI resolution could be got down to the cellular level? [and MRI also reports chemical activity for some atoms and some reactions] The easiest requirement for such a system that we could project meeting in the future might be the data capacity to almost simultaneously encode and transmit the exact location and orientation of the gazillions of cells in a living organism.
I am always wary of the mention of "soul" in a/. discussion but this time the comments about the unreality of the faxing-the-living notion, couched in terms that force you to think about which cell carries the soul out the nozzle of the printer were at least intuitively right on. Whole organism re-assembly on a cellular level is bunk. You'd have to start by freezing the critter to 0 degrees K so no life processes got interrupted and the locale of each cell would be constant long enough to [a] know exactly where it was so you could [b] put it back exactly where it belonged...the damn things wiggle like crazy in living tissue! and yes, its neigh impossible to keep some something at absolute zero in any circumstance, let alone while microtoming it cell from cell. [except bone and some connective tissue but thats where the article ended]
are you kidding? I'm sitting here watching my firewall snuff out barbarians who know how to use the DCOM "DCE BIND" against my Win2K box...why on earth would you want to pollute unix with a f**ked up microsoft version of an old and long since open protocol for distributing applications?
...and for those of you who are still wondering what TFA is about, note that just about every big system and OS vendor has its own version of DCE. It has been the foundation for a lot of securely networed applications.
In '93, I was making the big bucks at a defense contractor because I could tell them how/where to use DCE.
It is interesting to see the difference between the openess of the OSF and the openess of the open source movement [all that gnu software!] begin to blur.
I hope that exposure of the security code buried in DCE, especially where it uses kerberos, will help polinate other open source projects with improved security features.
The Feds understand IT security so much better than anybody at UCBerkeley that I feel completely safe with them having my ssn, income data, employment history, medicaid records, selective service, military records, and whatever the FBI/Homeland Security dug up. Yup, my mind is at ease.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you part of the way here, certainly as far as blaming the decline of American intellectual competitiveness on Fox Tv. Any country that gets its model for how to regard education from The Simpsons and its models for effort and achievement from American Idol and its notion of political right and wrong from The O'Reilly Factor is clearly rolling down the rails to ruin.
.
.
.
Seriously, sarcasm muddies the discussion. You have just dumped some odious kneejerk conservative stereotypes and xenophobia on us like it was a solution to China eating our lunch. Do you have a solution? Bush is just a stalking horse for far more intelligent people like Cheney, Rummy and Wolfowitz who share your selfish streak. Bush is too cozy with regligious fanatatics who don't know or care if the US fields well educated kids so long as Leviticus is made the law of the land and the bedroom. Bush didn't get us in the mess we are in vis a vis Asia's looming technology juggernaut. But he represents a party line obsessed with problems mostly of its own making on which our precious resources and dwindling time are being wasted. If we were pursuing international policies of justice rather than fear, reprisal and, lets face it, nailing down the oil supply, we could mount a better campaign to educate more Americans and make more of them productive [TFA emphasizes the output of universities but the country that has atrophied factories is going broke sooner or later]
Why not blame Bush? Who do you blame, [other than Fox TV]?
I am near to despair myself though obviously for different reasons. Liberals, the conservatives profusely write, are just whiners and blamers. They should talk to me, instead of just talking about me. I blame Bush but I also keep my skills up to date and manage to stay in work even as software jobs go abroad: thats MY solution. We can't keep China down, they aren't stupid people and they are used to their country's crappy ideas of personal and politcal freedoms. My bet is that their wages rise slightly and that new buying power then pushes up OUR prices, especicially for raw materials (some of which we still export). Then US wages effectively drift down to Asian levels and Asian wages stagnate as their govt's allocate more and more for the scarcer resources. Market force or government planned economy won't make as much difference as the Bush league would hope when the goal of not starving your factories becomes terribly near-term. My guess is the end-game has some gritty east-west parity where NAFTA-like agreements are seen as more important than nuclear weapons in shaping our future. That or we are all dead. I believe that what national survival is about is much the same as what species survival is about: getting the most bang out of the resources. That takes education, a point we seem to agree about. It does NOT take an administration that operates by banging on the countries that have the resources and spends our last nickel and borrows like crazy to play last super-power standing. We can't afford it...look east and see who can afford it.
I'll just hold my breath until they ship.
that should be "openbsd"
Where did I say or imply that I mistook this commenter to be the Theo? The first thing I did was click on his nickname. His [her?] profile claims a netbsd domain! If I am to address a reply to this persons comment and they have given themselves the name Theo, what should I do, Address them as "dear person masquerading as Mr de Raadt"? Really now, why do you say I am suckered? Its not like I should only reply to comments by certified big name posters.
In the US, Intel is such a hero to the US govt that DOJ will not make it easy for AMD to hurt Intel. But in Japan, Intel was plain and simple guilty according to many stories such as this and Intel finally admitted as much in their settlement with the Japanese. AMD should bring suit in Japan perhaps?
/. back on March 8 but it wasn't interesting then I guess.
I remembered how that charge against Intel played out because I submitted that story to
I'm not so sure Theo. Not that I know exactly what the standards of proof are in these cases but AMOUNT and VARIETY of evidence is extensive. On March 8, the Japanese Trade Commission charged Intel with anticompetative practices that included threats and thinly veiled kick-backs to induce sales...these are documented. Maybe that sort of thing has been "business as usual" up until now but I wouldn't stand for it if I ran AMD.
In fact, if you are an orthodox greenie or you are convinced that petroleum resources will dry up in the next decade, you SHOULD be DOING some low-tech nerdwork right now.
Some things I do:
- design passive solar heated housing: no electronics but some mechanical or hydraulic feed back to regulate temp from solar sources and earth/water heat sinks.
- composting: i have been experimenting with staging anerobic and aerobic phases to speed up the breakdown [it still takes me 3 years to turn unsorted yard and kitchen wastes into a good garden product.]
- design pedal powered mowing, earthmoving and transportation stuff...the bicycle, evolved as it is, is just a starting point.
- study how to produce solar concentrators of high precision without recourse to computers, CNC machines etc. We all know how to make an elipse with 2 pins and a loop of string but I know how to make a parablola with pulleys, string and an xacto knife.
- trying to figure out a sustainable tree and crop rotation pattern on marginal acreage that would support a family without motorized tilling and harvesting, using wood stoves for heat, in perpetuity on the minimum amount of land.
- self regulating greenhouses to extend growing season in colder climates and without pesticides or pumped water.
- low tech biological pest control. E.G. gypsy moths all but destroyed my oak trees 20 years ago but I found a few of the caterpillers were dying of some disease. I collected all the limp, sick ones I could find, waited until the fungus or bacteria that attacks them had turned them into little bags of pus, put them in a blender [the wife LOVED that!], filtered the product and sprayed it all over my property. To this day, even when the moths have denuded the trees in other parts of town, my trees fare well and the caterpillers are dying left and right. I need to study more so I can preserve the germs for use elsewhere.
Being a geek would be so satisfying if i didn't have to make enough money to pay all that tuition!...In the meantime, I don't suggest cutting back on vaccinations over fear of autism, ...
That is the public reason given by CDC for bending over backwards to keep any vaccine on the market: they know, to 3 sigma, what happens if you DONT get vaccinated and, having satisfied themselves of the cost/benefit tradeoff of the vaccination, set about downplaying those sideeffects so the public wont avoid the vaccine. Only problem is, its an incredibly high stakes game for Big Pharma and the poor and poorly publicised protections against conflict of interest between FDA, CDC and Big Pharma [such as have just come to light in this article] makes it possible for the financial interest of the drug company to get better protection than the public's health. In other words, the CDC wants to do good and Big Pharma want to do well and the way our system is working, it is possible to blur the two objectives to the favor of the drug companies.
People wouldn't complain. Slashdotters would complain.
You might have been just guessing or you might know something...I had to mod you insightful after I checked the weekly chart for SUNW...it happened just like you said.
latest bumble would be redundant so let me try to keep my blood pressure down and look for alternative interpretations of the decision:
If we kill enough of the basic data gathering about solar cycles, there will be less data to refute the head-up-their-ass contingent who say global warming is not caused by fuelish humans and is just natural variation in the output of the sun...
Nah, that didn't help me any either...what our govmint is doing to science just sucks any way I look at it.
I am still going to get 3 emails a day asking me to correct the credit card numbers and other data for an e-Bay account I don't have and never have had. [and partly because of the e-mails, never will have]
Its interesting that you and QuantumG both get moded insightful...I guess insights can be different without being wrong. /. readers are probably a bit more clued than the average person using a laptop at south station. And mind you, with Fidelity Investments, the Federal Reserve and a half dozen major banks all served by South Station, some VERY INTERESTING emails and transactions may be exposed. WiFi is not so old nor, in terms of user experience, so dissimilar from wired internet access that the average user should be expected to just know that he is far more naked in his communications.
It gets hard to keep track of what the real issues raised by the article are, there are several. But the argument over whether the potential for abuse inherent in sloppily set up WiFi is more like the victim advertising his vulnerabilities or not...well, lets keep in mind that the most likely victims are unaware of the vulnerability.
Although the article should certainly be a caution that the FREEDOM to communicate/compute anywhere can only be safely enjoyed if the individual user takes RESPONSIBILITY for his own security layer, real users just aren't there yet. The big picture of the article is that through slovenly and unprofessional practices, users have been rendered more exposed and vulnerable than they should reasonably expect to be.
- "...100 years.." Gimme a break! We don't know what is going to happen in the next 10 years...Why not just write: "this is an incremental break through in reconstructive surgery but it won't be interesting to
/. readers unless we set a timeframe that invites sloppy science fiction discussion "
- "Could it lead to a fax machine for complete living organisms?"Goofy speculation insanely beyond the already dubious speculation in the art. [researcher quoted in TFA:"...we aren't there yet" was speaking of scaffolds for organs, i.e. connective tissue only not whole organs] did poster RTFA?
- I only saw a few
informed comments well down from the top about what medical techniques are needed to compliment and make the potential of the tissue printer viable
- Since when is the 5th or 10th repeat of "I'll fax my fanny to the whitehouse" worthy of anything but REDUNDANT?
- if you just HAVE to talk about transporters as if they were the very next step beyond a system that harvests a certain cell type, ferments up a batch of those cells suspended in a fluid that keeps em alive as they are shot out a nozzle...then why not address the minor difficulty of sampling every kind of tissue you have [ brain cells with many specializations and perhaps as much of their critical functionality in the physiology of their synaptic connections as in their cellular chemistry may not even be the hardest to get right] and getting ALL of them to mass produce themselves in the same large ratio? Wouldn't it be more likely and less painful to suppose that in the future, MRI resolution could be got down to the cellular level? [and MRI also reports chemical activity for some atoms and some reactions] The easiest requirement for such a system that we could project meeting in the future might be the data capacity to almost simultaneously encode and transmit the exact location and orientation of the gazillions of cells in a living organism.
I am always wary of the mention of "soul" in aare you kidding? I'm sitting here watching my firewall snuff out barbarians who know how to use the DCOM "DCE BIND" against my Win2K box...why on earth would you want to pollute unix with a f**ked up microsoft version of an old and long since open protocol for distributing applications?
...and for those of you who are still wondering what TFA is about, note that just about every big system and OS vendor has its own version of DCE. It has been the foundation for a lot of securely networed applications.
In '93, I was making the big bucks at a defense contractor because I could tell them how/where to use DCE.
It is interesting to see the difference between the openess of the OSF and the openess of the open source movement [all that gnu software!] begin to blur.
I hope that exposure of the security code buried in DCE, especially where it uses kerberos, will help polinate other open source projects with improved security features.
The Feds understand IT security so much better than anybody at UCBerkeley that I feel completely safe with them having my ssn, income data, employment history, medicaid records, selective service, military records, and whatever the FBI/Homeland Security dug up. Yup, my mind is at ease.